In mid-October, Christie’s art expert Xin Li—a former professional basketball star and model from China’s Manchuria region—was escorting billionaire collectors through the Louvre in Paris. Days later, she popped up in Hong Kong to wine and dine tech millionaires at the auction house’s showroom. Now, Ms. Xin is in New York to field phone bids during the season’s major fall auctions, which started Tuesday and continue through next week.
“I’m never in one place for more than 10 days,” said the 38-year-old deputy chairman of Christie’s Asia. “I can’t be.”
Ms. Xin is a leading player in the art business’s central game right now: a race to match a small number of $10 million-plus masterpieces with a small number of mega-collectors, who are increasingly coming from Asia.
Next Tuesday, Sotheby’s will offer a top-heavy sale of contemporary art in which nearly half of its estimated $320 million sale total is tied up in eight of its 79 lots. The priciest, a red-and-black Mark Rothko, “No. 21 (Red, Brown, Black and Orange),” is estimated to sell for at least $50 million. There is also an avocado-green Andy Warhol silk-screen of Elizabeth Taylor sporting a swath of turquoise eye shadow, “Liz #3 (Early Colored Liz),” that is expected to sell for $30 million or more.
Over at Christie’s, the emphasis on blue chips is even more pronounced. Its Wednesday sale, where Ms. Xin said she may be bidding on at least a half-dozen major works, is estimated to bring in at least $600 million, the house’s highest-ever presale expectation. During the recession, these auction houses only offered a handful of $10 million-plus works across a two-week sale series. Next week, a quarter of Christie’s offerings are estimated to cross that bar—including examples by Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Francis Bacon, Cy Twombly, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning and Jeff Koons.
The price increases matter because they are buoying the entire art market, experts say. Nearly $60 billion in art changed hands last year, second only to sales in 2007 and up 8% over 2012, according to art economist Clare McAndrew. “A significant part of the uplift of the market was due to higher-priced works, rather than simply more works sold,” she wrote in a March report.
http://online.wsj.com/articles/the-art-worlds-high-roller-specialist-1415314210